Wine is a living thing as it ages in cask and bottle and it also lives on in the movies. But will there ever be a film that manages to convince that wine is better to watch than to drink?

Somm: Into the Bottle, the latest wine picture which premiered just weeks ago, is not likely to do so. The story magnifies the aberrations of the wine waiting profession and the wine industry as a whole.

It’s screenwriter and director Jason Wise’s sequel to Somm, a high-octane documentary which glorifies the intensity of the American master sommelier training programme.

But long before movies, music, modern pop culture and celebrities started to affect our lives and influence how we dress, how we think about ourselves, what we eat and drink, wine was already publicly talked, written and hyped about.

In fact, wine has held a special place in many ancient cultures. The great classical civilisations of Greece and Rome traced wine back to their prehistory and recorded legends around wine’s discovery.

Will there ever be a film that manages to convince that wine is better to watch than to drink?

Before the writings of Europe’s first wine writers, Ancient Egypt left us wine lists, wall paintings and the first wine labels ever recording the vintage, vineyard and winemaker on individual jars of wine.

The Babylonians laid down laws to regulate the running of a wine shop and wrote vivid descriptions of a magical, jewel-bearing vineyard in the Epic of Gilgamesh as early as in 18th century BC.

In today’s society, hieroglyphs have made room for numerous wine-related pages on Facebook, millions of tweets, snaps on Instagram and Pinterest and plenty of blogs complete with pod and video casts, all of which get people sharing opinions about wine. Wine is indeed a hot social networking topic.

Surprisingly enough, although motion pictures have been around for decades, wine lovers have had to wait until the late 1990s for the release of a couple of good movies with wine in the main lead.

Only now with the recent development of a global wine culture encompassing all continents and with a large enough audience out there, more such film projects have come off the ground.

An entertaining movie to curl up to is the comedy Bottle Shock which recounts the true story of the famous tasting in Paris of 1976 set up by wine writer Stephen Spurrier. This tasting actually paved the way for the acceptance of New World wines in France and the rest of Europe. The film essentially shows the snobbery that sometimes surrounds the enjoyment of wine.

With less comedic timing but pretentiousness aplenty, Red Obsession recounts the increase in demand in China for blue-chip Premiers Crus, reassuring viewers all is far from lost for the Bordelais.

Definitely more romantic is A Good Year, a story about a cutthroat investment banker dealing with hardship and love as he becomes a winemaker in Provence.

Dead serious and sobering but no less engaging is Mondovino. This long documentary criticises the globalisation of the wine industry and appeals empathetically for the survival of genuine family winemakers in difficult times.

Sometimes it’s the movies themselves that directly influence consumer behaviour. Take the example of the extremely human comedy Sideways – it’s a comedy because it’s really funny but also human, because it’s surprisingly moving. This wine flick actually became the first cult movie about wine and it allegedly caused US wine drinkers to switch from Merlot-based wines to others made from the Pinot Noir grape, simply because it’s the preferred varietal of the main character in the film.

It goes to show that wine is more than a beverage. From story to sip, our perception of what’s in the bottle is very easily influenced. May meaningful wine writing continue to offer perspective.